No Such Thing As A Fish - 361: No Such Thing As The Mosquito Effect

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss how many mosquitos you can fit on to your cutlery, how to disguise yourself as street furniture, and why every diver in the world should be thankful to goats.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in a particular order here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is there is only one mosquito in Iceland. Poor lonely mosquito, how'd it get there?

Well we think it maybe came over from Greenland on a plane because it was found in the 80s by a guy called Professor Gisleymar Gisleysen from the University of Iceland and I wrote to Professor Gisleysen and he wrote back and he said he boarded a flight at Keflavik Airport in 1986 in June and the plane had come over from Greenland and it was making a stop in Iceland and it was going to Germany and he was walking down the passenger cabin and he saw this mosquito and he thought what's that doing here and he's like I need to catch that mosquito and so he legged it along the aisle chasing this mosquito and he managed to grab it and then he was going to work at Karlsruher at the University for three months but he

had this mosquito and he knew it had to go to Iceland so he kept it for three months. Had he killed it by this point? It was dead. I think it probably died when he grabbed it so he then kept it in his room in this University for three months and then when he came back to Iceland he gave the specimen to the Icelandic Institute of Natural History, they put it in some alcohol and they kept it behind the scenes as this one Icelandic mosquito but and this is where it takes a Dan Brown kind of twist.

In 2016 the New York Times interviewed him and asked him about the single mosquito and they went to look for it in the Institute of Natural History and they can't find it. So we know that it exists, we know it's in Iceland somewhere but we don't know exactly where it is, it's probably in the drawer somewhere but we don't know where it is. I think the real story here is this guy's eyesight, if you're walking along the island of the plain and he spots at a distance a mosquito, he calls it as a mosquito not just a fly. Exactly, this guy, he smashed it, he's like, yeah, I know a mosquito, I want to see one.

But I don't get it because the mosquito was on a connecting flight to Germany and still went to Germany where they have mosquitoes. So is it because it had landed initially in Iceland that he thought that counts? I think it definitely counts because it's certainly an Icelandic airspace, isn't it? It was in Keflavik Airport. So I've been, like, you know when you do this, where you count all the countries in the world that you've been to, I do that sometimes to try and beat my wife and the way that I beat her is by counting countries where literally we just landed and then we took off again

and I never got off the plane like Bangladesh. I went to Bangladesh and I should just stop there and never got off the plane but I count that as going to the country so I think this mosquito should do the same. Do you think this mosquito had one of those scratch maps and you just rub off a new country every time you go? I'd love to see James, your Bangladesh photo album, just all shots of the inside of the plane. Are we sure the mosquito wasn't someone's emotional support animal?

A really good point. Ruin their trip completely. Yeah, but the thing is there aren't any mosquitoes in Iceland and it's one of the very few countries where there aren't any. Pretty much every other country in the world has them and that includes Greenland which is colder and it includes other countries like in a similar area to Iceland such as Great Britain and things like that. All these places have got mosquitoes but Iceland doesn't.

The reason is that they are cold but they're not always cold. They have lots of changes of climate all the time and so it gets really cold and then it gets kind of not too cold and then it gets really cold again and stuff and the changes are so rapid that mosquitoes don't have time to complete their life cycle because they have a particular life cycle whereas in Greenland it's much colder but then they do have areas that are the more steady climate and they can survive in places like that. Yeah, in Greenland they're massive aren't they? As in they're massive in size Anna.

They're a huge in size and reputation. Oh yeah. I think they are particularly big. I mean they heard deer. What? That's how impressive they are. They heard caribou in Greenland but they don't really do it deliberately so they're particularly vicious ones apparently because they don't have access to that much blood so

there was one researcher who said only about 15% ever get a blood meal and they need a blood meal to survive the females do and so they're super vicious and they harass caribou and if a caribou baby gets attacked by a load of mozzies it can kill it but the adults they see the mozzies and they run away and actually apparently this is quite useful because mosquito harassment are red is a big factor in making sure caribou don't overgraze. They just move them along to stop them overgrazing the land. They run to the top of glaciers. They have to go that far to avoid mosquitoes chasing them.

Wow. It's quite shaming when you're that big. It's like an elephant in a mouse. I hadn't realised up until researching this fact how dangerous they have been. A few numbers have been crunched together and they believe that 52 billion humans, nearly half of all of us have ever lived, have been killed by mosquitoes. Half of all humans ever. I'm unclear but I think that that might be a useful misconception to debunk because I

think that estimate is often stated but I was reading a thing that actually crunched the numbers and it was basically saying maximum it's probably only about 7% of the population. That's still a lot. It's a hell of a lot. It's still a lot. It's many billion but I don't know. No one really knows where that original estimate came from so it may have been someone who was doing some better number crunching.

The place I was reading about this was in a book called The Mosquito, A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by a guy called Timothy C. Weingard and to be fair, as awesome as the book sounds and as awesome as he is, he does say a few things that make you think I think you're giving the mosquito a bit more credit than it deserves. He also says the extinction of the dinosaurs is down to the mosquitoes. Now obviously we've all heard the famous story about the asteroid hitting the earth but he says up until that moment 70% of regional dinosaurs had been made extinct by mosquitoes and they probably would have taken out the rest but the pesky asteroid got in their way.

The asteroid just finished the job the mosquito had started. Is that what he's saying? Took the credit, yeah. It's like the Americans swooping in at the end of the war because they've been plugging away for six years. Yeah, they are bastards. They kill a hell of a lot of us and they've got so many different ways of doing it and I hadn't quite realized how recently it was that we realized that certain diseases were

spread by mosquitoes so it was really the turn of the 20th century. So fever but in humans thousands of years, 3,000 years at least and only in 1900 did people put it together that that was mosquitoes. We used to think that mixomatosis was caused by mosquitoes but that was proved not true in the 60s and it was found not to be true by this amazing entomologist called Dame Miriam Rothschild and she basically worked out that it was fleas that did it and she did that by just carrying plastic bags full of fleas around with her in a bedroom in her house. She had just had all these fleas around and she worked out the life cycle of the flea and

then she worked out that it was controlled by the sex hormone of rabbits which would let it finish its life cycle and that's where the mixomatosis came from in the rabbits. But she was amazing. She worked in the Enigma Projects at Bletchley Park during the war. She had a lab in Plymouth with all of her fleas and stuff and it got bombed and she lost seven years of work. You're going to say she lost seven fleas. They don't mention that much when they do the statistics in the war do they?

There's seven fleas that were lost. In 1952 she wrote a book called Fleas, Flux and Cuckoos which she started writing while pregnant and marooned in the channel due to a storm living off a diet of boiled potatoes and she said all she had was a pen and a piece of paper and some boiled potatoes and so she ate the potatoes and started writing her book and her later book which is called An Atlas of Insect Tissue which came out in the 80s on the jacket illustration. It has the close-up illustration of the vagina of a flea which she claimed made it unique in the publishing world.

It's the only book with the vagina of a flea on the front cover. Yep. Seems likely. How is she stranded in the channel? What's happened there? She was on a boat going either from the UK to Europe or the other way around and there was a storm and they couldn't go to part. Was it stranded for so long that they were reduced to living off potatoes?

People are reduced to living off certain things when they've been out for weeks. It's true. It feels like she was looking for a great origin story for her book. I thought this is finally a cool enough circumstance. Someone's just brought around the potatoes. It's true. I mean, it does sound like one meal, doesn't it? It sounds like a way to brought around chips on the ferry because they were refueling.

Another thing that mosquitoes are responsible for, that we can thank them for, is the creation of Great Britain. It's true. Yeah. Now, this is according to Timothy C. Weingard, a human history of our deadliest predator. He says that in 1698, Scotland was attempting to colonize the Americas and really set them self up. They sent out five ships and these ships got to Panama and the mosquitoes of Panama gave

them all malaria and so on. They got really, really sick and it turned into a huge financial crisis. England stepped in, offered to pay the Scottish debt and in doing so, Scotland had to forfeit sovereignty and that was when they united with England. Thus mosquitoes created Great Britain. In fairness to your guide, that one is pretty much true. I'm pretty certain that's true. The Scots, what they were trying to do is like all the colonial powers around the world

like Spain and Portugal and England, were all going around finding these countries to subjugate and take over and the Scots thought, we're going to get in on that and they decided to go to this place called Darian, not realizing that it was just full of midges of mosquitoes and I think there was like some con man who'd gone to Edinburgh telling everyone that there was this amazing, was it called Gregor McGregor or something? He told everyone that this amazing place that they could all go and live and stuff and it was just a complete swamp. Such a good story.

It's actually really unpleasant for mosquitoes feeding off our blood. I know it's quite unpleasant for us as well, but it's really hot because they're insects. They actually don't have such good thermoregulation as we do and so when they feed off our blood, which is obviously at our warm, blooded body temperature, they get boiling hot and the only way that they survive it is by urinating all over themselves as they do it and kind of bleeding on their buns. Really? Yeah.

So, wait a minute. So, the food is too hot. So, you've got some hot soup and instead of blowing on the soup, you urinate over your whole body. It's another option, James. Just next time you're at a dinner party, it's worth trying and it looks cool. You should look it up. So, scientists are really confused about why they'd waste fresh blood.

They'll drink your blood and then you'll see a little droplet of blood sprouting out of their anus and they obviously haven't got the nutrients out of it and that's because it's getting so hot that they need to excrete some of that liquid so that it evaporates off them and carries the heat away. It's a bit of a shameful experience. If you're a mosquito researcher, do you know how you get mosquitoes to mate with each other? It's very sexy stuff. What you have to do, you start off by decapitating the male and then you have to anesthetize

the female. Right. And then you have to grab the male and insert his still-prosuding genitals into the female and then they will lock together and sperm will be transferred between the two and the female will become pregnant. And some people can do that without a microscope. What? How do they decapitate it?

Do they have like a tiny little guillotine or...? They have to put it through a show trial first though. Yeah. Also, how come the female's the one that gets the anesthetic? Isn't the male they're going? I don't think it's starting decapitating the female. Yeah. It's a good point.

It's really messed up. I know. It feels like there's a lot going on there where really the only part of it is you get the male genitals and you put them inside the female. I don't know why you have to decapitate the male. That's something I really don't get. It feels like a lot of that stuff is being done for fun by the researchers. We found out a new way of transporting mosquitoes because this is quite important.

So let's say you've got a load of mosquitoes that are sterile and you want to put them in an area where they have disease problems like malaria or Zika or something and you put the sterile ones in there and they can outperform the non-sterile ones and then it hopefully stops them from hurting humans. But how do you get them from A to B? Because mosquitoes, they don't really go on really long flights unless they go on the IS-192 from Gotthav to Keflavik, they do. But normally they only go about 100 meters from where they were born.

So we need to get them from one place to another. A load of researchers have found out that the best way to do it is to squish as many as you can in a little vial because it turns out they're not that fussed about it and they kind of stay alive. Whereas if you put fewer of them in the vial, then they might kind of bash around and stuff like that and they might not survive. Whereas if you put something like, you know, 1200 mosquitoes in the space of a teaspoon is what I'm talking about, 240 mosquitoes per cubic centimeter and you squish them all

right down. They have this kind of exoskeleton that can almost like fill in all the gaps. And so there's no gaps in between them all, which means they can't wriggle around, they can't hurt themselves and only maybe the ones at the very top and the very bottom would get injured and the rest of them, when you let them free, they're okay. Nice. It's like a jigsaw. Like a jigsaw, yeah.

Or getting the London Underground. I've definitely been in a situation where I've seen jigsaw positions. But it definitely is. I thought it was like the London Underground because I remember feeling safe when there are so many people you don't need to hang onto the railings, right? Because you're just all sweaty in time against each other. No one can fall. That's why you always went on the tube with 12 really buff bodyguards that you are now

who just kind of gathered around you. Yeah, it was very expensive catching the tube actually. I mean to pay those salaries. Did you guys know that mosquitoes are responsible for the Magna Carta? Is this another of your... Dan. According to Timothy C. Weingard, author of the Mosquito, a human history of our deadliest predator, he says that Louis the Seventh Siege of Damascus was during a malaria season

in 1148. The downfall of that, the fact that it couldn't happen, led to his separation from Eleanor of Aquitaine. And that led to her marrying Henry the Second of England, which then led to the birth of King John, who was then having all those battles with his barons that led to the Magna Carta. So really, mosquitoes again have shaped history in ways we've not given them credit for. All right then, if we're doing tenuous things that we can thank mosquitoes for, we can also thank them for gin and tonic, which I think there may be one fewer connection.

Gin, its reputation was ruined, start of the 19th century, because all the scummy gin houses and it was making people behave very badly. And then it became a bit of a heroic drink, because this was round about the time that the Brits were colonising India, and they realised that the only way to stave off malaria was with quinine. And so they started making tonic water with loads and loads of quinine. And so quinine became this great heroic drink, because it was saving the British colonisers in India from getting malaria, and it was brought home.

They chucked it in gin, and suddenly gin went from being a scourge on society to being a patriotic thing to drink when you paired it with tonic water, and thus the gin and tonic was born. They also spread Christianity bizarre. Dan, you've got to stop reading Timothy C. Weingard. Listen, I'm telling you, the mosquito, a human history of our deadliest predator, is fascinating. According to Timothy C. Weingard, it's because people were dying of malaria that people who were pushing the Christian faith were going out to help the sick, and in helping the sick,

they were able to spread the message more. So malaria was leading to actually a huge burst of advertisement. So if people were dying of other stuff, then the Christians would have gone, no, fuck it. If it's not mosquito related, I'm not interested. Exactly. Could have been a very different world. But once again, the mosquito has forced the course of history that we've ended on. Yeah.

They shouldn't call it the butterfly effect, should they? They should call it the mosquito effect. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that in the early 20th century, Japan had secret propaganda underwear, which you would only show to your close friends or family. OK. So. Wow.

So this is a kind of clothing. They were common in Japan in the early 20th century. Basically, they're a kind of kimono. There are lots of different kinds of kimono and also lots of different things to do with kimono. So there are under kimonos. There are Miyamera kimono, which are kind of swaddling kimonos for babies, all sorts of kimonos.

And around about 1900, Japan started producing various artisans, started making really stunning modern kimono prints, which were Art Deco and they were Cubist, and they had all sorts of beautiful modern patterns on them, and they had cities and ocean liners and skyscrapers and trains and planes and everything. And they were secret because you wouldn't obviously be flashing your undergarments or the linings at people unless it was to people you knew quite well. But yeah, to be honest, we probably had known each other three or four months before you started flashing your undergarments at me.

Exactly. You got you got into what I call the inner circle. Well, I wish you had gotten that. Those things sound not propaganda, though. You know, it seems harsh. If you're brandishing some Art Deco, that's all like artistic expression. I think it's more what we call it, isn't it? That's like the term that people call it propaganda kimonos.

They did make a slight twist into more outright propaganda territory when the government became a bit more militaristic and a bit more fascistic as well. So you could get Mussolini underpants as well, under kimonos as well. Really? Yeah. They had Hitler. They had Abyssinia. They had Hitler ones too, anti-aircraft guns on your under kimonos.

It did go in that direction. They're seen as slightly embarrassing now, but they didn't start out that way. I bought some pants in Japan once, but they were Godzilla on them, so that's not the same thing as it. Well, they were just still slightly embarrassing. These ones that you, these propaganda ones you were mentioning, Andy, the really interesting one was the one that was made for kids that you mentioned, the Mayamari. That was made for infants that were going to a Shinto shrine for the first time to be

blessed. And when they were doing the propaganda ones, they were quite full on. They had soldiers preparing to dash through a field of exploding shells and children on the garment sleeve. So it was all about children in war, largely when you saw these things. It was really pushing the idea that kids should be believing in battle as well. Yeah, it definitely went a bit in Goebbels direction, didn't it? They were very much trying to suck up to the fascists at one point of their underwear making

industry. And there is some shame attached to it now. This is what I thought was really interesting about the article that you sent around, Andy, which I think was an out of the obscura piece, was the woman who first revealed it was this woman called Jacqueline Atkins, who I partly liked that she was a Fulbright scholar in Japanese textiles, which I didn't realize they did Fulbright scholarships in, but she tracked them down. She started, she went to Japan and she started seeing these propaganda, slightly fascistic

kimonos, and she asked people about them and they wouldn't tell her anything. And she found this woman who had a collection and she really didn't want to speak to her because, you know, she was like, it's really embarrassing. My family don't know that I have these. No one knows. There's no written records of them. The history has been really suppressed because, you know, it was very militaristic, putting pictures of fighting children on children's underwear.

But yeah, so it's only come out recently, hasn't it, this whole thing? I love that the kimono itself roughly translate as thing to wear. Yeah. I think it's just such a random, and even these propaganda ones that were designed, they were called omoshiro garas, and omoshiro garas just means interesting or amusing design. So just thing to wear with interesting or amusing design. But these days, like, to get a really good kimono, they're unbelievably expensive. We went to a kimono shop when we were in Japan and tried to buy one, thinking that it would

be expensive, but not that expensive. And they brought you in the shop, like, you know, you're in a car showroom and they showed you all of these amazing prints and stuff. And then only at the end told you it was going to be like 20 grand for one of these. I know. And like, you know, you can get them for all different price ranges. But if you go to these specialist shops, that can be the amount they're so expensive. Were you like, you were trying to leave the shop, but you didn't want to seem like you

didn't have the money. So you bought something anyway and just went, God, you know, I'll just go for those Godzilla underpants. How much? Five grand. They are really artisan there, aren't they? The people who are designing them. There's one family that has been making kimonos and still to this day. And I think they're the last surviving of the sort of historical makers of it.

So they're called Chiso and they were set up in 1555. And it was initially set up by a guy who was making it for some monks. And all these four centuries later, they are still making it with the same family. It's a descendants of the same family. It's like the pastor we were talking about the other week of just it being handed down. It's a company that has over 600 people designing these things and putting them together. Yet still, they only make 25 kimonos a year. That's how precious and time consuming and dedicated it is.

Yeah, they're slow, aren't they? They're slow at making them. I'm sure it's a very difficult process, but they say a standard kimono takes three to four months. This is just this company, but it's not unusual for it to be a year and a half for one kimono. So if you're thinking emergency for the party at the weekend, you're not in luck. They once spent 10 years developing one specific kimono, trying to get the indigo dye exactly right. You might have changed your mind about whether you want it by then.

I mean, you'll have changed shades. You might have changed like your idea of what color you want. You're like, actually, you know, I'm not really I don't I was thinking more violet rather than to go. The thing is, if you change shape, doesn't matter. That's a joy of kimono, right? You can go up to forty five fifty stone and because it just wraps around, just wrap it around a bit looser. Everyone looks good in the kimono. Washing them is an absolute nightmare, as far as I can tell.

Hey, it looks like it's extremely expensive, time consuming, but also you just can't do it on your own. So in order for you to wash a kimono, the whole thing needs to be taken apart into seven different parts. And then you need to air dry them and then restitch the whole thing back together. There's special kimono washing stations in order to do it. They have a huge process to do it. They wash it by hand with soapy water. They then lather it with seaweed paste. They hang it on these panels to dry such a long process, but you have to literally take it.

It's like going to a car wash and then taking your car apart to wash it back together. It's mad. I'm not really surprised if it takes ten years to make. I would be staggered if there was a label inside saying just bung it in on 16 for an hour and a half. I think just soap under the armpits for a couple of minutes and you're fine. When you're putting on your kimono, make sure you always bring the right side over the body first and then pull the left side over the right side, because the opposite way is the way the Japanese dress the dead. And so if you do it that way, it's a big faux pas or someone will just think you've died.

You've worn one, haven't you, James? You sound as a very fetching image. Well, what I'm looking at now and why I said that is because I was given a three steps to wearing a kimono by the hotel, which made us wear these kimonos. Instead of you don't wear it, you're not getting dinner this evening. And that's what they said. And women would put the sash around the waist and men would put it over the hip bone, slightly lower down. So that's the difference between men and women.

That's how you tell the difference. Yes, exactly. You know, is that a live man or a dead woman? You can tell by just looking at the kimono. I was speaking of wearing kimonos during dinner, James. I was reading that in order to make sure that you don't have to go and have your kimono washed, you often have to do preventative things. For example, wearing in a kimono, part of that is so that it doesn't touch the body and take on the odor.

So you have to protect in that way. If anything gets onto the kimono, immediately get cleaning on it, because obviously the nightmare. I know. I'm just thinking actually, when I had that dinner, I shouldn't have ordered the spaghetti bolognese because I got sauce all over my kimono and it's going to take them three years to wash. No, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's I was reading this lady on Quora who said exactly that, that when she sat down to dinner in her kimono, the waiter came over and immediately padded her entire body with cows and napkins for fear that she would be getting it dirty. James, just say the spag ball is a representation of a traumatic war scene.

This is the som, OK? The questions. They used to have magic eye kimonos that you could get and these are 300 years ago. Yeah, they're wow. OK, I'm really now look when I say magic eye, no, hang on, everyone calm down a bit. I was just thinking, right, just hear me out here. If you were to have a pair of trousers, which were magic eye, and then people stared at them and then it looked like a bulge was coming out of the groin to make your genitals look bigger.

That would be quite clever, wouldn't it? That'd be really good if you wanted to be arrested. Why would I be arrested when people are staring at my genitals? Good point. It's not a fair system, James. Yeah, that's what the flashers say, don't they? Not forcing you to look. Sorry. OK, so when I say magic eye, basically, it's all about the way they change the perspective.

So there is a kimono from the 18th century, but it has hawks on the bottom half of it, right? It hawks the birds of prey. And on the top, all around the top, a half of it, there are these Japanese characters, which looks like they're referring to different birds of prey. But actually, it can be read in two ways. And actually, if you read it in the other interpretation, it's all about visiting prostitutes. And that's, it's a kind of naughty sex kimono. I love it. Very cool.

I was trying to find other kinds of kimonos. I like going to Wikipedia sometimes and pressing the button that gives you their surname as kimono. Anyway, what I found is, did you know that there is only one band called Kimono in Iceland? Nice. That's very strong. Go on. And how did they get there? Were they chased down the Isle of a Plain, taken to Germany first? Actually, they're pretty cool. They were formed in 2001, and they've had a bunch of albums.

And one of their members actually left them recently, moved to London and joined the vaccines. Oh, really? Yeah. So one of the vaccines members used to be in kimono in Iceland. That's very cool. So here's an interesting kimono. I read about this in the New York Times in 2007. This was because in Japan, there is still, and there definitely was a worry of women being assaulted when they're walking down the street.

And so this thing was invented where you would get your kimono and then you would almost turn it inside out. And there was a few flaps and stuff, and then you could stand by the side of the road and it would make you look exactly like a vending machine. So you would walk past and you would think it's just a vending machine. But actually, it was a woman who turned her kimono inside out to make her look like a vending machine. James, I can't believe I'm going to say this to you. What are you talking about? This is a thing it was invented by someone called Miss Sukioka,

who's a 29 year old fashion designer in Tokyo. And that was the idea. I'm not sure. I don't think they would commonly came into use after 2007. If you ever go to Japan, you'll see there are vending machines everywhere. Like that is one thing about it. So it is. Well, are there? We don't know.

Exactly. No vending machine anywhere. That's what I thought when I went to Japan. I thought there's so many vending machines, but no women in this country. Aren't you more likely to be touched by a man who's thinking he's using a vending machine than you would if you were just standing being a woman? That's a really good point. Yeah, I suppose you know.

Yeah, maybe your vending machine should look like an empty vending machine or maybe like one of your Twix's should be just hanging off. So anyone who sees it goes, oh, that's a dodgy one. That's not going to give me my Twix. I don't know if there's one. I mean, the worst case scenario is when you are a bit cheeky and you stick your hand into the vending machine to try and... I'm just saying this is going up a lot of possible problems.

I'm with you. Do you have to bring out a hundred Mars bars with you whenever you go out? If you don't, you get people violently shaking you to try and extract what they think they're owed. I'm not saying it's a flawless system. I'm just saying it's a thing that at least in concept form existed. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that fish get the bends if you reel them in too quickly.

I know, put all little things and they get it worse than we do. Stop really fishing. Yeah, or reel them in very slowly. This is a genuine problem because in a lot of recreational fishing, you throw the fish back into the water. You know, you don't want to deplete the supplies. You don't want to kill the fish. But actually, I read one estimate that in Western Australia,

70% of certain fish are thrown back into the water. And someone estimated that about 50% of those will actually die because they've got the bends from being reeled in. And so the bends is the sort of very painful consequence of like if you've been diving very, very deep in the water and then you come up far too quickly, there's this extremely quick decrease in pressure that you undergo and nitrogen bubbles released into your system.

And it's very painful. It's called the bends because of the position that it renders you into. You sort of bending over in agony. Yeah. And yeah, fish get it too. And with fish, it's more like they often just get bigger and like bulgier and their eyes pop out. Sometimes their stomach bulges out their mouth. Yeah. And there's a few ways to stop it being a problem.

So you can vent them if you can somehow kind of put a hollow instrument through their body into their swim bladder wall. It can release some of the gases and that can help. Unfortunately, you have to be a bit of an expert to do that. Don't just shove a byro in because that's like most people who try and do it. It doesn't work. I just think it's amazing that method that you can do mini surgery. Yeah, fish like a tracheotomy.

Just it's incredible. It is really amazing that that can happen. Yeah. The other thing that you can do is you can put them in a fish elevator, which is a word for basically a milk crate with a rope attached where you put the fish in and very slowly weigh it down. So it goes back to where it came from. And if you threw the fish back in, it wouldn't know to go back down to the depth.

No, well, I don't know if it knows, even knows it's a fish, but it would like naturally try and go down to the bottom. But the problem is it's full of this gas, so it can't go anywhere because it's like it's floating, you know what I mean? OK, yeah. You need to somehow get the gas out of it or get it back down to where it was before so that the gas changes on the pressure. That's basically because they have this swim bladder, isn't it?

So actually, it's worse because when they have gas bubbles in them, the whole swim bladder inflates like this, literally like an inflatable. And so they're just stuck at the top. There is another method you can have to bring them down, which is attach a descending device to them, which is basically a weight that you put onto its lip. And you just have clamp it on there and it just tugs the fish back down with it.

And then it comes off, you can set it to release at the particular depth that the fish should be swimming around at, I know. When Anna, you said that the name the bends comes from when you bend over because you're in so much pain. I found this really interesting. It's actually named after something called the Grecian Bend, which I'm sure you all read about, which is incredible. So people do bend over in pain because they have this.

But at the time in the 19th century, there was this thing called the Grecian Bend. And it was a way that women walked where they kind of stuck their thumbs out because they had a big bustle. And they stuck their chest out and they kind of look like they're in a bit of an S shape. You'll see it if you see like illustrations that are kind of taking the piss out of the way women dressed in the 19th century. You'll see that people dress like this. And basically when people started going into mines or diving

and they started having this problem, it was around the same time that the Grecian Bend was a really fashionable way for women to dress. And so people said, wow, you're bending over like you're doing the Grecian Bend. And that's why it's called the bends. Those women kind of enjoyed being made fun of, though. Oh, they didn't care because it's fashion. Like, you don't care if you're fashionable, you don't give a fuck if people are saying,

well, what an idiot. Look at you with your big, you know, Godzilla pants or whatever. You're like, I don't care. These are fashionable, mate. Like, I don't know. I'd be sensitive to it if only those women had had a way of disguising themselves as some sort of common bit of street furniture. Just while we're talking about the bends,

did you guys read about John Scott Haldane? Oh, I know about him. Yeah. What a guy. So this is this is the person who started studying the idea of why you would get the bends as you were coming up. And in 1905, he would task, would try to find this out. So Haldane was a very famous scientist in his day. And actually, just a quick bit of background about this guy.

He's someone who helped to create the gas mask that we had at the First World War by literally going to the front line and finding the gases and diagnosing what they were and then coming back and making the masks. He was someone who threw himself into experiments to make sure he could understand what was going on. In the case of decompression and working out the bends, he was tasked with trying to do that. And he used groups of animals to begin with to try and do it,

but they all weren't matching humans. So eventually he worked out the goats with a perfect match. They weren't quite perfect. It was like 1.7 goats would make up the human, but they were close enough. And so he had 85 goats come to this one spot in London and he would put them in these big chambers and then release them into the fields outside and watch how they responded. And that's where they started learning about the stages of decompression.

So all these experiments eventually lent to Haldane working out what we still use today as the standard decompression stages that you would use if you were a scuba diver still to this day. And it was based on 85 goats. Just a little note on that. They then moved to live trials on humans and the ship, which they did live trials on, was called HMS Spanker. Oh, here's the thing about who might get the bends.

Sometimes scientists now think that ancient sea monsters also got the bends. Did they? This is incredible. So have you heard of a Mosasaur? It's like a dinosaur, but they were a different kind. They lived in the sea. Like there are pterosaurs, which those winged ones. So it's dinosaur adjacent. So scientists have found fossilized vertebra of Mosasaur.

And they were about four or five meters long, a really big animals. But they found a strip of dead bone in an otherwise healthy bone. Now, I don't understand what that means, because it's all obviously fossilized dead bone, but they somehow found a bit of the bone is different from the other bone. And they think that decompression sickness is the only possible cause of why you would have that sudden layer all the way through the bone. Interestingly, though, if they found the dead bone inside the living bone,

that suggests that they had the problem, but then they survived it because then the living bone grew around it, doesn't it? Yeah. They figured out the decompression stages thousands of years before we did. So maybe I feel like I've been tricked into saying that. I think dolphins get it as well, but have actually worked out the decompression stages, they believe. So people found something similar in dolphins have been washed up on a

beach recently, which was that they had little pockets of air in their blubber, which shows that they obviously are suffering from something like the bends, like the air is accumulating, but it is thought that what they do is they come to the surface and if they feel like they've got the symptoms, then they dive back down again really deeply to sort of re-equalize and they keep coming up and going down until they don't die, which is sort of how people used to do it before Haldane came along, I believe. You just have to dive back down to the bottom of the start again till it works.

It's crazy. Gosh, that must have been just the worst, mustn't it? When you're in so much pain, they're like, well, you're just going to have to go back down again, mate. Oh, what? Really? That's what caused the problem in the first place. No, that's the way.

It's so bad now, though. Now that we do know, it's almost as bad if you're diving, right? There's this Egyptian diver called Ahmed Gaba, who beat the record for the deepest dive in 2014, dove 332.35 meters down. That took him 14 minutes to get to that depth. He then spent 13 and a half hours getting back up to the surface, deep compressing along the way. Oh, I've got to say, when you're going down, if you see like a nice shipwreck

or a nice load of fish or something, you just don't look at them. You just go down as quick because otherwise you're spoiling the whole way back up, aren't you? You're right. You've got time on the way back for that title. Yeah, exactly. But don't they have chambers that you can? I remember watching an episode of Baywatch years ago where David Hasselhoff very bravely swam to the bottom of the ocean to save someone, a scuba diver who

was trapped and then brought them right back up. And the whole episode is basically him inside a decompression chamber back on the surface. Now, don't we have those? Can't you just swim up and just get into a... Yeah, but it just is slightly more expensive to provide every amateur diver with an entire decompression chamber. But you're right. For this guy, actually, you would have thought you're breaking a record.

I agree, stingy. But if you come back up, Dan, wouldn't David Hasselhoff have got the symptoms and then have to be put in a decompression chamber to kind of push? You'd have to get Hasselhoff into the chamber as quickly as possible, really. Yes. All the time, this nitrogen is trying to get into your body. But if you could get back into the pressure as quickly as possible, you might be OK. Yes.

Yeah. But I mean, that's a tough guy because you don't want to rush him. He hates famously being Hassel, doesn't he? Oh, boy. Hasselhoff. But at the same time, Baywatch was a big showback then with a big budget. So they probably could afford one of these machines, unlike amateur divers. On the lesser production home and away, probably couldn't afford that.

That's why there are so few deep-sea diving plotlines in home. Well, there was that. Do you remember there was the whole nine months of when they were all coming back to the surface, just on the way? All you just saw, you just saw a flat bit of water with a few bubbles coming up. The show was just called Away for that series. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 18th century London, professional boxers would challenge opponents by publishing requests to fight in the letters columns of newspapers. Wow. So I stumbled on this fact while reading a book called The London Monster by an old buddy of ours, John Bondeson, great historian, and has nothing to do with the London Monster, which was all about a sort of precursor to Jack the Ripper. But in there, he was talking about interesting things that happened

in newspapers at the time. And he mentioned that boxers would sort of publish challenges to each other. And they'd would tease opponents and they would propose fights and where and when and so on, and then would wait for a response to come through, maybe in the next day's newspaper or the following days to say, yes, I accept. And then you would know a fight was on. Such a weird way to communicate with each other. Were they rude?

Would they say, you know, I will be kicking your head in at three o'clock tomorrow. Bondeson says polite, but he also says that they would often put in some barbs and teasers along the way. I think sometimes it was quite insulting. I've read a few of these. There was one, for instance, this was the first ever, I think, really professional fight between two women in the UK. It was Elizabeth Wilkinson versus Hannah Highfield.

And Elizabeth Wilkinson put an advertisement in the newspaper saying, I, Elizabeth Wilkinson of Clark and Well, having had some words with Hannah Highfield and requiring satisfaction to invite her to meet me on the stage and box me. That sounds quite polite. It's quite polite. But maybe for the day it was a bit unpolite, right? Because there was another one she was fighting, someone called Anne Field,

who was an ass driver from Stoke, Newington. And she said in that one, an ass driver, an ass driver. You know what an ass driver is. So like, let's say you've got a donkey driver. Yeah. So someone who has a load of asses and wants to get them to market and so has a stick and kind of walks into market and hits them and makes sure they go in the right direction. Cool. It just took me a while to put donkey

because of the meaning when you said ass driver. I just thought that's that's where I got confused. Yeah. She was trying to get a fight with this ass driver from Stoke, Newington called Anne Field. And she told anyone who read the newspaper that the blows which I shall present her with will be more difficult for her to digest than any she has ever given her asses. Yeah. So, you know, that slam does work better

when you say asses instead of donkeys. Well, exactly. Just an implication of kicking your ass that you need in it. That's what she should have said. I'm going to I'm going to kick you and then I'm going to kick your ass. Yeah. Apparently the Elizabeth, who was one of the people in that fight, she also used to have couples fights like couples nights, but when you would have couples

would be pitched against each other, which sounds quite fun. So cool. But it was mixed doubles, wasn't it? So it was I think it was men fighting men while the women fight the women. It was very I don't think it ever happened that men would fight women in the same. It's that's not really like mixed doubles, because in mixed doubles, the man can serve to the woman, right? It's not like you don't just hit it to the man or the woman hits it to the women. So it's like, yeah, I would watch a mixed doubles

where there were two balls in play at the same time and it can only go between the same sex. Yeah. Yeah. So hang on, she was called Stokes, right? This is Elizabeth. She is called Elizabeth Wilkinson. Also, Elizabeth Stokes, because she got married halfway through her career. But she was a nay one.

Nay Stokes or nay Wilkinson. I didn't want to say which one was nay, because I couldn't know. The donkey was the nay, probably. It was the bray. But yeah, they were they were like almost professional boxes. And the way that they told the difference between a professional and a non-professional was that they wouldn't fight topless. So you would have like prostitutes doing fights where they were all topless.

And this would be like a way of making money because they would get lots of people to watch them and people would bet on it and they would make money and stuff. Whereas these people like Elizabeth Wilkinson, they were more proper boxes, really. Yeah, I read a description of those more bawdy I bet you did. fights that would happen in the streets.

Yeah. So there was a guy called William Hickey. He wrote about it. He saw a fight in a tavern in Drury Lane in 1768. And his description of it was the whole room was in uproar. Men and women promiscuously mounted upon chairs, tables and benches in order to see a sort of general conflict carried upon the floor.

Two she devils, for they scarce had a human appearance, were engaged in a scratching and boxing match. Their faces entirely covered with blood, bosoms bare and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies. For several minutes, not a creature interfered between them or seemed to care a straw of what mischief they might do to each other. And this used to happen a lot, apparently, these these fights that were going on. But women fighting was a thing

that Elizabeth Wilkinson was desperately trying to make normal because you would almost think that female professional boxing was not a thing back then, but actually it started in 1722. And it was very popular. And it was not only seen as let's let's beat each other up, but let's try and empower women. It was a real movement. They even try to at the arenas,

which would usually be the bear gardens in London, where you would usually go to see a bear fighting a monkey, which was a massively popular thing back in the day. They even tried to set up galleries where women could go and watch it. So the upper class women could come and see it and say, oh, this is a womanly thing as well as a male thing. Wait, so women could go and watch the bears fighting the monkeys or the women fighting the women. Could any bears and monkeys go and watch the bears fighting the monkeys are?

I think there was one person monkeys. All right, OK. Lord Byron's bear would have gone. I think Stokes had an amphitheatre later in life, as in she must have been really successful because I think she and her husband ran a boxing theatre because I read an advert for it, which advertised that there would be bull, bear and ass baiting.

But also sorry, is that is that like donkey baiting? Is that that is donkey baiting? Yes. Donkey baiting sounds even more rude, doesn't it? Yeah, the farmer was caught donkey baiting. But the final event or I don't know if it's the final event. It's the words of the ever say a dog will be dressed up with fireworks to augment the diversion of the spectators.

I mean, it sounds unbelievably cruel. Yeah. We touched on this in our vinyl when we released a vinyl. I think James, James's fact, I think was about boxing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But you're not going to hear anything else. This is a bit like one of those porn sites where you give a 30 second teaser and then you cut them off.

You can't know anything else about that fact, unless you buy the vinyl. Yeah. Yeah. Or like a trailer for a double movie, a bit like that as well. It's like lots of things. If you want to go high, brah, right. Feels like a very pent up episode of the podcast. We've been in our houses for almost a whole year. We all need to go away and have a bottle of whiskey each.

We should say that it was all illegal, right? We keep saying professional boxing, but until quite late, it was all kind of illegal, even though it happened all over the place. I think the main way you can make a living from it was in boxing booths, which I didn't really know about, which is all because they lasted until the 1970s. And of course, you were born in 1940, Anna, so it's really weird that you weren't there for them. Well, they sound fun. These came about in the 1700s and it was a way that boxers sort of professional,

even though it was illegal, would travel around with fairs. And anyone who attended the fair would challenge the boxer to a fight. Now, I don't know why anyone did this, because that's a professional boxer inside the booth and you're just a pleb. But that's what they did. And, you know, you pay pay a bit of money to do that or to see it. And I think the famous one was Tom Hickman. He was in the 1820s and he was known as the gas light man because he told everyone he won

when he hadn't actually won. I'm the champion of the world. He put your lights out. Oh, very good. Yeah, but actually boxing booths, the reason that there's a more relevant association with them in the modern day is that in the 1930s, there was a minor who lasted three rounds in a boxing booth with a professional boxer. And so he won a bit of money, used that money to buy a wedding ring for the women he fancied.

And they had two sons, Bobby and Jack and surname Charlton. So without boxing booths to credit another spurious link without boxing booths, England would not have won the World Cup. It's no wine guard connection. I don't think he would have put that in his book. Just on betting on whether you could beat boxers. There was one quite weird trick, which was round turn of the 20th century in Texas. There would be a circus would come into town and there would be a woman outside

the tent promising 50 dollars to any man who could stay three rounds in a boxing ring with her. And then people would go, yeah, no problem. And they pay their five dollars and then they'd walk into the tents were very conveniently all the lights are extremely dim and you couldn't really see what was going on and then found themself in the ring with a male boxer wearing a dress who would beat the crap out of them. I thought you were going to say that the lights were all extinguished, but she'd been eating carrots from a very young age.

Wow. Have you guys heard of Daniel Mendoza? I'm sure you came across him in your reading. He was one of the... Don't recall the name. No. He was really famous for his style of boxing. He basically, he was five foot seven. He was about 70 kilos. He was relatively, he was a sort of middleweight rather than a heavyweight, but he was still a champion boxer, despite that.

And I've read that he basically came up with the idea of avoiding being punched like before that, you just sort of take the hits and hope that you could hit the other guy harder and he came up with a style of moving and basically avoiding being hit really hard, that sort of revolutionized boxing. Yeah. And he was really, really tough. He wrote his memoirs later in life. He wrote in his memoirs, he was so tough that he once got in three fights on his way to a boxing match because he was so angry.

Firstly, someone cut him up in a carriage. So he got in a fight with them. Then a shopkeeper tried to cheat him, allegedly. And then third, someone just looked at him in a funny way. And so he arrived at the boxing match. Oh, he sounds lovely. Yeah. I don't know if you can claim you're so tough,

if you've invented the tactic of avoiding being punched. I think he was compensating with that story. I was reading about one very famous fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Jack Sharkey. And this had been organized by William Randolph Hearst, who was the newspaper magnate. And these two were the biggest boxes of the day. This was going to be a huge, huge fight. The amount of money they could win was going to be huge.

There was so much gambling on it and everything. Then halfway through the fight, Fitzsimmons hit Sharkey a low blow. And according to the Associated Press, it left Sharkey lying on the canvas, unable to move his legs, though he clutched spasmodically at his groin with his gloved hand. So he's basically can't carry on because he's been hit below the belt. And it was a really obvious shot. But the referee, apparently, didn't see it.

Because we think William Randolph Hearst had bet $20,000 on Sharkey to win. And the referee happened to be a friend of his, whose name was Wyatt Earp. No. The famous Wyatt Earp. Yeah. The Wyatt Earp. The Wyatt Earp actually worked as a bodyguard for William Randolph Hearst. And he was like, well, we're going to need someone to referee this match, who's going to, you know, help me to win all my cash with the betting thing. And so he got Wyatt Earp to be the referee for the match.

I'm really shocked because I thought Wyatt Earp was a good sort of upstanding lawman. I know. Clearly not. It wasn't that a thing that followed him around more so than the gunbattle at the OK Corral. It was, it was in his obituary. It was sort of, he became a byword for if you did something dodgy, you were pulling an earp or something like that. Yeah, it became like a humongous cause celebra of him being the biggest cheat of all time. And yeah, really, it spoiled his reputation

as if that could happen. But yeah, so funny. It used to not be illegal, though, to hit someone or certainly to grab them below the waist. It used to be just, you know, that's boxing. You could hit people when they were down. That was just not against the rules. I was really, really rough until about the mid 18th century. That's UFC, isn't it? I guess hitting people while they're down. It pretty much is. And, you know, gouging and all sorts of vicious practices

were just allowed until this guy, Jack Broughton came along and he devised the Broughton's rules. Some people say it's after he accidentally killed the opponent in the ring. He said, maybe we should professionalise this. And I think that's when gloves were introduced. I did read that with Broughton, who actually codified the first boxing rules in 1743. It was actually the case that in most fights, you didn't kick people when they were down. It all punched them when they were down or attacked them when they were down,

even though it hadn't been codified. But the way that the rules upheld was just by the masses. And so in reports, you'd have, instead of an umpire, there's massive crowd around them. And I think in 1726, someone recorded, for instance, that laws were very strictly observed. Because basically, if you didn't obey the unofficial rules, then the entire mob of obeying people descended on you and attacked you. Well, that's a good way of doing it, isn't it?

It's a good way of refereeing a match, yeah. I got something on modern day boxing. Yeah, definitely. Did you know that there is only one professional male boxer in Iceland? Oh, come on. Is that true? Yeah, that's absolutely true. He's undefeated in his home nation, isn't he?

So professional boxing got banned in Iceland, something like 64 years ago, it's been banned. And so no one has ever done it professionally. But this one guy called Kolben Christensen, he's the only person that has taken it on and he goes internationally to fight people. And he's finding it really hard because he's got no funding. There's only about four boxing rings that are in Iceland.

How, wait, wait, how, how, yeah. How are the four boxing rings in Iceland? They're hangovers. Yeah, but you've got four times more boxing rings than you have boxers. You can't find it hard to ring up and get a booking at any of them. How's your schedule looking? But it only allows amateur boxing. So no one's doing it, no one's professional.

He's doing it professionally. He's setting up matches overseas. He's going to Berlin. He's got coaches that he's trying to get. He's having to fund his own matches, which he loses. He's not, he's not very good. So he's been losing the matches. So he's broke.

And yeah, so he's, and he finally was getting onto a roll because he signed up with the trainer of Tyson Fury, who's been looking after him, suddenly getting into it. And he's now gone pro and he's winning all his matches. And then COVID hit. So he's had to go back to Iceland to just be the only professional boxer with no one to punch. Can I just say, what's the name of this guy?

Kolbein Christensen. Okay. I just want to say, Mr. Christensen, if you're listening, that dad thinks that you're shit. But I think you're probably an extremely talented boxer who deserves respect. So if you're reading the letters pages of the Icelandic news, you'll see a polite invitation. Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account. I'm on at Shriverland, James. At James Harkin. Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there. There's also links to bits of merchandise

that we released over the year, like a vinyl. Why not check that out? Anyway, we're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.